


Imp

by Korvesta_Kaakkoon



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 13:48:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21137711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Korvesta_Kaakkoon/pseuds/Korvesta_Kaakkoon
Summary: Missing her recorder, Entrapta goes for the next best thing.





	Imp

**Author's Note:**

> There's no way these two wouldn't be friends, right?

Their portal project had hit a snag. Without the proper key, all their otherwise well put together plans and programming would do little good. Entrapta was sitting in front of her computer, trying to crack the code. She’d been sitting there for few hours now, inserting variables and seeing the code fail again and again. 

First Ones’ tech was complicated, but rarely so complicated that Entrapta couldn’t crack it eventually. 

This was just taking a little longer than she’d expected. 

No matter, she thought and cleared some clutter from her desk. Loose nuts and bolts fell to the floor, a hexdriver disappeared under a pile of datapads. She reached for a drink, a fizzy, bright green thing that made her limbs tingle and thoughts run fast. 

Something rattled overhead. Entrapta hardly registered it. Something was always rattling in the Fright Zone, where the machines never slept. It kind of reminded her of home. 

She put the cup down and reached for a screwdriver. One of her cleanest ones. She kept it around her desk and barely used it for its original purpose. 

She started chewing on its handle. 

Something chittered above her. That something scuttled around before dropping down and landing on the desk with a thump. Entrapta reached for the cup with her hair absentmindedly as other things clattered to the ground and Imp chirruped an odd little laugh. Entrapta kept working. 

The tiny clone walked on all fours on her desk, rummaging through it, lifting data pads and sniffing at the noxious green drink before putting out his little tongue in disgust. Emily beeped in question from the floor, but neither Entrapta nor Imp was paying her much attention right now. 

“There has to be something,” Entrapta muttered and scratched her head with the screwdriver. “Hmm.” It was a tough nut to crack. It seemed that they were missing something. There was some sort of a force over the whole planet, maybe even the space around it, that created an impenetrable shield against space portals. It was the thing holding Hordak trapped on this side. But there had to be a way to bypass it. Any program could be diverted, if you just knew the code. Princess Glimmer was fully able to teleport short distances, so portal technology should have been an easy modification of that. 

Maybe they should borrow Princess Glimmer for a while. Surely she wouldn’t mind. Although, the last time they’d spoken, she’d seemed angry.

Oh well. She’d mention it to Hordak later. 

Imp was now sitting next to her computer, tiny boots held bottom to bottom, hands resting on them. He was watching the text intently. 

The First Ones were crafty, no doubt about it. Their technology had been advanced, but that hadn’t been enough to see them survive to this day. Their knowledge was vast, but even though Entrapta could decode a lot of it with the basic knowledge of their alphabet and lexicon on her translating software, there were still so many mysteries left to solve. If only there was a quicker way to absorb the knowledge right out of the data crystals. 

Hmm. She scratched her head and leaned back on her hair. 

“Now there’s an idea,” she said more to herself. “Some sort of a direct way to feed information to the brain. Hmm.” She reached with her hair, trying to find her recorder. When it wasn’t where she usually left it on the table, she was forced to turn from the screen. 

Imp was watching her with a tilted head. Entrapta looked back at him, without really seeing him. 

Where had she left it?

She clambered up on her feet, then swung with her hair to the other side of the desk. 

No sign of the recorder there. 

It must have fallen. 

“Emily, did you see where my recorder went?” she asked.

The bot rose to her feet and spun around, whooping quietly and helping her look. 

Imp rose from the desk, waddling to the edge and peering over it. 

“Did you see where it went?” Entrapta asked. 

He opened his mouth and when he did, Entrapta’s own voice came through. 

“_Now there’s an idea._”

Entratpta blinked, then swung closer. She peered at the little clone, tilting her head. 

“You didn’t eat my recorder, did you?”

He screeched and bowed his back like an angry little cat. 

“Fascinating,” she said, her search momentarily forgotten. “How long can you hold onto recordings?” She studied the little creature closer. “How much can you hold onto until it gets recorded over?”

He tilted his head, then opened his mouth again. 

The voice that came through was Catra’s. 

“_I lost Shadow Weaver!_”

“Wow!” Entrapta said. “I have no idea what that means!” She whirled around on her hair and tapped her chin in thought. “But this is something we could test out! A-ha! You’re now my lab assistant!” She pointed at Imp and the little creature chirped, flapping his wings and grinning. 

“Excellent!” she said. “Begin recording! Now!”

Imp chirped again. 

“Experiment log, Fright Zone, 67, Imp. I have decided to experiment on the memory capabilities of my new lab assistant, Imp. I will as of now, for the time being, due to lost equipment, switch into using my lab assistant’s innate abilities to record anything he hears. The purpose of this experiment is to, uh…” She scratched her head in thought. “Find out how much data and for how long of a period Imp can hold onto it. End recording!”

There were no visible signs that Imp had done as she asked. She swung back and forth on her feet. 

“Okay, play it back to me!”

The recording was nearly perfect. Better even, than her usual recordings. It held none of the auditory static her normal recorders naturally picked up, none of the clanking from the background, the hissing of the pipes or background noises of the Horde soldiers doing their things outside. 

“_Fascinating,_” Entrapta said. “What are you?”

Imp said nothing, just stared right back at her. 

Hordak probably wouldn’t have liked it if she opened him up to see if he had any tech in him, right? 

But she could get X-rays. She was sure she’d had that equipment brought from Dryl after the annexation. 

She put her hands on her hips, pleased with this new little side project. It was good to keep things busy. 

Her fingers brushed against a lump in her pocket. She reached for it and pulled out her recorder. 

Oh! There it was! She’d put it into a wrong pocket! That made sense. She placed it on the table. 

“Let’s begin the experiment!” she declared.

*

Hordak wasn’t going to admit he was worried. Of course not. That would have been preposterous. The supreme leader of Horde’s forces on Etheria did not get anxious. His insides weren’t twisting and his hands weren’t sweaty. Such weakness had been culled from his gene line.

He would’ve liked to find Imp sooner rather than later, though. 

He knew Imp wasn’t popular among his troops. The little tattletale loved mischief. Hordak could see how he enjoyed snitching on the troops and getting them into trouble. There was no hiding that smug look. He’d made enemies listening to the conversations of the others from the vents and then running to Hordak to tell what he’d heard. 

But surely none of his soldiers would be bold enough to try to get rid of him, right?

No. Hordak was no fool and it’d been drilled hard into him, that hopeful thinking got you hurt. Nothing stayed secret forever, no matter how hard you tried to hide things. Sooner or later everyone would fail him. Getting rid of Imp was right out of Horde’s rulebook. Everyone was here for themselves first and everyone else was fair game. Strength and cunning were rewarded here and getting rid of a spy would have been the smartest move one could make if Imp had heard something they hadn’t wanted him to. 

But he was also his only living clone. The only one of them that had survived gestation despite the deficient genetic material used to create him. 

Hordak wasn’t worried. He just needed to make sure his assets were in working order. 

He needed to find Imp. 

He’d been missing for two days now. 

Hordak barged into the Sanctum. 

His eyes landed on him the moment he entered. 

Missing for two days and here he was, sitting on Entrapta’s lap while she worked. Entrapta was using one hand and three tendrils of hair on the portal’s machinery, while the other hand was patting mindlessly on Imp’s head. 

“_This_ is where you’ve been?” Hordak barked. He was not bitter. That would’ve been beneath his status. “Sitting around and wasting your time?”

“Huh?” Entrapta said, lifting he head from the work. She propped her welding mask off to get a better look at him. “Oh! Hordak! Hi! I’m not wasting my time! I’m building a cooling system for the portal!”

Hordak halted for a moment, swaying on his feet. Imp turned to look at him and poked his little tongue out. The nerve! He knew exactly what he was doing!

“Bah!” Hordak said and threw his hand. “I’m not talking about you. I’m talking to that blasted Imp!”

The creature in question let out a hurt screech and burrowed deeper onto Entrapta’s lap. A tendril of her hair snaked around to scratch him under his chin and the smug look Imp was giving as a response to Hordak’s baffled expression almost had him screaming. 

He was _not_ jealous of the blasted clone. He wasn’t! 

“Imp?” Entrapta said, then looked down at her lap. “Oh! He’s not being a nuisance. He’s my assistant!”

Imp grinned and lifted up Entrapta’s recorder. He was holding it like a prize. 

“He doesn’t need a recorder,” Hordak muttered. 

Entrapta scratched the side of her head. “No? He doesn’t. But we’re conducting a scientific experiment! Show him what we got, assistant!”

Imp opened his mouth and the chatter coming out was instantly recognizable. Hordak had been listening to similar prattle ever since Entrapta had joined him on the portal project. 

“_Experiment log, Fright Zone, 71-1. Attempting to run a current through the simulation. Again._”

“_Experiment log, Fright Zone, 71-2. Unexpected side-effects. Well, actually. Quite expected. The potency of the explosion was unexpected, though._”

“_Personal log, Fright Zone, 457. The food hasn’t gotten better. I have devised a machine that could – _“

It just kept going. Log after log of Entrapta’s stream of consciousness talk about her experiments. It became clear that Imp had been here the whole time, probably sitting on Entrapta’s lap and bothering her. For two days. While he’d been worried. 

Hordak grit his teeth. 

“Imp,” he bit out. “Helping out Entrapta is well and good, but you have other responsibilities as well.”

Imp whine loudly and gripped Entrapta’s free arm while she turned back to the machine. 

“Imp,” he said, warning. 

Imp stuck out his tongue and blew a raspberry. 

The insolence! He’d never dared to do anything like that before! Not to Hordak at least!

Entrapta snorted and patted Imp’s head again. The look in her eyes was soft, the smile half-there, like she didn’t even realize she was doing it. 

…

Well. 

He supposed it was fine. Horde wasn’t going to fall just because the leader’s spy was going to be busy for a day or two. 

Hordak crossed his arms and pursed his lips. 

He could manage. At least now he knew where to find the little creature. He could leave him with Entrapta for now. 

And not just because he didn’t want to be the one to tell the princess she couldn’t keep him.


End file.
